The potter’s vessel; a solemn warning of judgment
In chapter 18 this principle is fully demonstrated before the people (vss. 1-10). But the people in despair as to God, in the midst of their boldness in evil and in contempt of His marvellous patience, give themselves up to the iniquity by which Satan deprives them of their hope in God. God announces His judgment by the prophet, whose testimony provokes the expression of the confidence felt by a hardened conscience in the certainty and immutability of its privileges, and of the blessings attached to the ordinances with which God had endowed His people, and to which He had outwardly attached these blessings, which maintained their relationship with Him. What a dreadful picture of blindness! Ecclesiastical influence is always greatest at the moment when the conscience is hardened against the testimony of God; because unbelief, which trembles after all, shelters itself behind the presumed stability of that which God had set up, and makes a wall of its apostate forms against the God whom they hide, attributing to these ordinances the stability of God Himself. Conscience says too much to allow the unbeliever any hope of standing well with God, even when God opens His heart to him. “There is no hope,” he says; “I will continue to do evil; moreover, the law shall not perish from the priest, nor counsel from the wise; nor,” he adds (the false prophets having the ear of the people), “the word from the prophet.” The warning which this chapter contains appears to me very solemn. I can scarcely imagine a more terrible picture of the professing people’s condition. The prophet asks for judgment upon them. This is in the spirit of the remnant trodden down by the wickedness of the Lord’s enemies.